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The record took its time, but eventually sold a million copies (none of their subsequent releases has failed to hit this mark). Consistently high-achieving, OutKast became mainstream pop stars when, in 2000, their single Ms Jackson – an apparent apology to the mothers of their partners – was a hit around the world. But it was their third album, Aquemini – titled after a 13th Zodiac sign the pair came up with, combining Patton’s Aquarius and Benjamin’s Gemini – that cemented their fame. By illustrating their individuality within a collective framework, it paved the way for the duo-as-soloists concept of Speakerboxx/The Love Below.

“Back then, rap didn’t look like a career – it was just something you did,” Benjamin says. “But around Aquemini, that was when I knew: OK, people really enjoy it and we’re good at it, so let’s dive on in completely – the concepts, ideas, sounds, everything.”

The album received widespread acclaim from within hip-hop and without; but it was its one single Rosa Parks that brought OutKast into the wider realm of American public consciousness. The song was their challenge to conservatism in rap, and its chorus – “Hush that fuss, everybody move to the back of the bus” – was their way of saying to would-be competitors that there was a new sound in town. But by titling the song Rosa Parks, after the civil-rights veteran whose refusal to sit in segregated seating on a public bus in Alabama helped unpick the legal foundations of America’s racial divide, the group ended up defending an embarrassing legal case that contended they had sought to profit from Parks’s name.

“It was resolved before she died,” Benjamin insists. “We weren’t found to have been in the wrong, but we had to make a commitment to do something in her name, some sort of tribute. And that ain’t bad. I just hate that somebody has to force your hand.”

The tribute – its form and its execution – is yet to take place; in an interview in 2003, Benjamin claimed that a relative of Parks had approached him after a Detroit gig to say that Rosa had not been behind the action, and blamed the litigation on lawyers.

There is a school of thought that suggests OutKast’s odd couple are so different as to be almost incompatible: that their fortuitous balance is forever on the brink of collapse. Benjamin, it is commonly believed, is the aesthete – the dandy, the eccentric, the slightly away-with-the-fairies member. By contrast, Patton, the theory runs, is much more streetwise, more grounded, more earthy. This is a convenient synopsis, but does both men a disservice. It not only implies that Patton must be Benjamin’s creative inferior, hitching a ride on his partner’s elaborately sewn coat-tails, but that Benjamin, because he stepped outside of rap’s confines on The Love Below, has somehow removed himself from the world of hip-hop entirely.

True, Benjamin’s flair for theatrical absurdism had been visible in his taste for eccentric attire since a life-changing moment in 1996 when, after one too many prangs in his Cadillac and a soul-searching moment looking at himself in the mirror after a particularly heavy night, he took the decision to give up drugs, drink and eating meat. Patton, meanwhile would entertain visitors to his home with a trip to the basement – a club he called the Boom Boom Room, complete with a dancer’s pole.

Yet it is Patton, not Benjamin, who is a devotee of the distinctly un-hip-hop Kate Bush (“She actually e-mailed me,” he says today, somewhat amazed. “I want her to produce two or three songs on my [forthcoming] solo record. She said, ‘Whenever you come to England, you can come stay with me and camp out and we can make it happen’.”). It was on Patton’s Speakerboxx half of the double LP where the most strident social and political messages were to be found; and of the two, it is the supposedly secular and streetwise Patton who recently married the mother of his three children (he has a daughter aged 11, and sons of 6 and 5), while Benjamin, the perceived romantic, remains single, although he is involved in the raising of his eight-year-old son, Seven Sirius, who lives with his mother, the soul singer Erykah Badu, in Dallas.

The theory that OutKast must be drifting apart also seems to be erroneous. “It’s like you have a personal arsenal, you go in [to the studio] on your own and do what you’re doing, then bring it back to the table to see if it’s good enough to make the final cut,” says Benjamin. “No matter how experimental I wanna go, I know Big Boi has a jam factor,” he smiles. “It could be a whole bunch of elephants and a tuba, but if it ain’t jammin’, it don’t matter.”

The Idlewild album is out on August 21 and the film goes on release on September 8. A download-only single, Mighty O, is released on Monday

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